Comments on: Meer vs Taylor on SupCom 2

By: bill

bill — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 03:43:12 +0000

I think the problem is that a good SP rts doesn’t make a good MP rts.

Good MP RTS games have to be balanced and fair, which means the enemy AI has to simulate another player. Good SP rts games can forget all about that stuff, and simulate a real situation, or a fun situation.

the AI war website explains it better than I can… but most RTS AI is actually RTS-player AI, rather than enemy soldiers AI.

Some of the best RTS games ever were pretty unsuccessful because they didn’t do multiplayer, at least not well. sigh.

By: ManaTree

ManaTree — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:47:31 +0000

AGAIN, I must add that this is also NOT the majority case. It can happen, but it’s definitely worked wonders on my end. Very few failings.

Also, the only requirement for offline mode is remembering your password. No internet is technically needed; just for the first log in.

By: SwiftRanger

SwiftRanger — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:24:39 +0000

Silly man, you don’t even know the exact unit limit (it’s not 120 as the EG interview implied, they were talking about different units in total there as each side has 40 or so unique units now) or the flow of the new game (which according to Sorian is even better than FA). You sound just as lunatic as the die-hard TA fans who didn’t like SupCom before release as well. I’ll wait till release and judge GPG’s capabilities then.

And then I am not even mentioning the fact that there hasn’t been said a word about DLC yet, remember you’re talking about a company which gave away free units for SupCom and new Demigods for Demigod.

By: SwiftRanger

SwiftRanger — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:20:21 +0000

You only tried the “worst” part of DoW II if you only played the demo. It was the best RTS of last year because of its multiplayer/skirmish gameplay and its free Last Stand co-op mode. You’re missing out on a lot of RTS goodness and that’s coming from someone who still thinks SupCom/FA are the best RTS games of recent years. DoW II is the polar oppositie of those games but its mechanics definitely stick and work as a whole, it’s just pure tactics and map control. CoH without the fat and the boring setting imo.

By: w

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:29:32 +0000

Steam is bad not just because it enforces annoying DRM, but also because it makes Europeans pay crazy prices for software. Steam was created with the promise of lowering prices of games because of the lack of middlemen, shops, boxes, etc. It has been a marketing gimmick all along, but only several years back it became painfully apparent after people got burned.

I refuse to pay more for the exact same product just because my countrymen supposedly make “more money”. Globalization is not reserved just for companies, it’s for ordinary people too. But people are sheep and they won’t resist, and so we have games that sell for $35 and $60 depending on the region. It’s not a pair of shoes that costs more to make in Europe, people, it’s a digital download. Different rules apply. Resist!

By: KngShango

KngShango — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:35:22 +0000

oh wow, you speak from my heart.

By: ToadSmokingDuckMonkey

ToadSmokingDuckMonkey — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 12:08:58 +0000

I’ve probably spent at least 2000 hours playing multiplayer in the RTSes that this man has had a hand in. Total Annihilation, Total Annihilation: Kingdoms (yeah, he left in the middle), and Supcom/Forged Alliances. Probably more than 3000. These games define the RTS genre for me. I even played a little Demigod.

The problems with Supcom 2:

1. No mods or user maps. I don’t have anything polite to say about this.

2. Ever dollar you just spent on worthless faff for a story to excuse giant fighting mechanical things is a dollar you could have spent getting those coordinated attacks working right again (they did in Beta of Supcom 1) or those time estimates (which worked rather well until the first major balance patch to vanilla supcom (2251?)).

3. You never fixed the problems with Demigod that were not the fault of Stardock. Go online, try to play Torchbearer. He is useless due to some bug with the animation code (he is supposed to shoot while moving, but does not). This doesn’t engender trust, just like

4. Demigod. Great idea, terrible as hell execution. You can’t tell me that ditching stardock is going to fix the fundamental problems you had outside of multiplayer. Like the core animation system issue, which stretches back all the way to Supcom. Gaspowered even hired a modder, online name of Sorian, to try to chase some of this down because he was expert at it. Chase down his blog.

5. There was more promised more support for Supreme Commander than delivered. Gaspowered seems to blame THQ, why will Squeenix/Eidos/Godknowswhat be any different?

6. The * Siege games were crap imho. Chris Taylor’s take on improving the Diablo formula. If Supreme Commander 2 is his take on improving the Supreme Commander/Total Annihilation formula (hundreds of units that use any special abilities they have with reasonable skill fighting each other), then there is a fundamental problem.

Chris, I love the TA style games, don’t kill what I love, please. This “no resource collection” and “you get research points by fighting!” nonsense will lead to horrible micromanagement that newcomers will not be able to learn faster than they are turned off of the game. As it stands, I won’t buy it.

You can get me to buy it thusly: Promise that Supreme Commander 2 will not be treated like a box of Q-Tips by your publisher. Kotick and his packaged goods mindset need to go. I won’t even ask for user mods or maps, if you just keep it regularly updated with your own content- no, I will not pay for DLC unless you have at least 40 multiplayer maps in the retail box. At least provide some faculty for upping the unit limit again, your games are about the pageantry of 200 tanks smashing 200 other tanks for being painted a different color, and no amount of scripting SP campaigns or “story” will change this.

P.S. “your games are about the pageantry of 200 tanks smashing 200 other tanks for being painted a different color” includes Dungeon Siege and Space Siege. They both needed more of this to be awesome.

By: ToadSmokingDuckMonkey

ToadSmokingDuckMonkey — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:47:43 +0000

@MD: Yeah, Steam has issues. Offline has usually worked for me in the past 3 years. Most non-Valve titles that I have will run in their directory happily, whether steam is running or not- handy with GFWL software like Fallout 3 and GTA4 which get graphic corruption due to GFWL and Steam fighting for the DirectX overlay.

Steam also interferes with punkbuster, as much as any resident tool that grabs the DirectX overlay does. Thus, I play GTA4/Fallout 3/Enemy Territory: Quake Wars/CoD4 much less than I otherwise would, because I like the community features of steam.

By: MinisterofDOOM

MinisterofDOOM — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 09:55:01 +0000

I’m VERY impressed with Taylor’s comments in that interview. I like the way he thinks and it is impossible to express how reassuring it is to know there’s a developer out there who understands that innovation is only good when it does good things. After hearing so many good things about Dawn of War 2 I downloaded the demo and gave it a go. I found it so amazingly bland and flat. It traded everything I love about the RTS for things I never would have thought anyone would want.
They took the S out of RTS. It’s just a third-person shooter with an overhead perspective and you can switch which character you’re controlling. It’s the same mistake Blizzard made with WCIII. If I want to play an RPG I’ll play an RPG. And if I want to play an RTS I’ll boot up an RTS. What I absolutely DO NOT ever want is something that tries to be both. WCIII tried and failed. DoWII tried and failed. It doesn’t work. It cannot work. The mechanics that are good for one are bad for the other.

The singleplayer focus also really pleases me. I’ve never been much of a multiplayer gamer, but particularly with the time investment necessary for a good solid multiplayer RTS match I’d rather just have a solid story campaign I can count on to hold up the purchase value of the game.

I’m very much looking forward to SupCom2. With C&C4 looking worse with every bit of new info it’s very nice to know there’s something on the RTS front I can actually look forward to. I hope this game makes GPG filthy rich.

Side note: It’s weird as hell seeing the Square Enix logo on a scifi strategy game box.

By: MD

MD — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 02:22:08 +0000

Oh man, I forgot about the mod incompatibility issue. In certain cases, that devalues the Steam version of a game hugely.

Edit: I’ll also second Hattered’s annoyance at the startup time. Obviously it’s not a particularly big deal, but it’s a genuine irritant for me too.

By: Hattered

Hattered — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 02:20:19 +0000

@TheApologist:
First, let me second the posts of MD and Vin. Good reasons all. My own petty annoyance with playing games on Steam is the need for it to start up, connect, and do whatever before the game actually gets permission to start (just tested and it took about 25 seconds to get to the game’s splash screen). It’s nearly on par with needing to find and insert the disc before playing. It may be a minor thing, but I seem to avoid my Steam games since I began buying from other distributors.

By: Thants

Thants — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:37:55 +0000

Well, that’s what was great about SupCom’s single player (Forged Alliance in particular): it gave you a huge map and some general objectives (destroy the enemy base) and let you go about it however you wanted. With just enough story to give you an excuse to be doing it.
That’s what this kind of game’s single player should be like. Just big interesting sandboxes to play around in.